I write unsent letters, and I write unfinished stories. Today, I did both.
Letters are simple--bursts of emotion dashed off to myself or to people who will know what the meanings are. Writing a story might take more time. In the days when I wrote every day, I might spend twenty to forty minutes and have 300 to 500 imperfect words to show for it. Something, at least. But the stories that mean the most have been with me since I was young, before I was writing them down.
I fold pieces of them into other stories, other characters, other circumstances, and they are not literally mine anymore, they're safely somewhere else. But only I could tell them.
I began writing the stories I couldn't write down when I was four or five, and instead of written words they came out in tears. Tears of emotional release as I settled into my private world where I could process the terror of my childhood.
Poems came later, at age ten, when I woke long before I had to for school and sat down to write as my form of meditation.
I brought the old poems out of a forgotten cranny in my room today and put them on my office shelf.
Then I went off to be with friends. Friends of a friend, and some of them knew me and some of them didn't, but it was good.
Sometimes maybe you shouldn't log back in to the Internet after a thing like that. Or maybe you should. I don't know the answer.
A "mother" left her son, her disabled son, with CP, in a park, alone, to die there.
As a child of five, of ten, of fifteen, this was my single greatest fear.
The parallels are there--not exact, but close enough. Close enough that I wrote stories so close to this mark from age nineteen until I don't know when--I'm still writing them.
In the stories, always, my character is saved. Not saved by love of a mother, because I have never been able to write that story, but saved by the love of caring, obstinate people who believed in him, chosen family, of a partner, of a life.
When I was younger, imagining the details of the life was an easier task, and I don't know if what I have now would seem like much of anything to most people around me, but here I am, alive, having cried my tears, having had my heart palpitations, and having gone to find my characters. I listened to them process the news, reassure each other that they were safe and so was I, and then I put words to paper--the letter unsent, the story unwritten, but known, inside of me, and I breathed. Because I must.
